Turkish language
Turkish belongs to the Turkic family of languages, spoken for many centuries across a vast territory stretching from the Balkans to China (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005). It is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world: the seventh most widely spoken, to be precise. Turkish itself is spoken predominantly in the Republic of Turkey.

The Turkish language underwent two kinds of radical change as part of the revolutionary reform programme, launched by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk following the establishment of the republic in 1923. The first was the change of the alphabet to an adopted form of Latin script in 1928. The second was basically about the lexicon, launched by the Turkish Language Foundation in 1932. The aim was to purify Turkish from Arabic and Persian elements (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005). The language reform has proved to be very successful due to the fact that Turkish has been basically the language spoken by common people all through the centuries. Today, poems as old as 800 years old, such as those of Yunus Emre, are totally comprehensible in modern Turkish.

The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are:

• ·Vowel harmony is a phonological process which determines what vowel will appear in the second or third syllable according to the vowel in the first. Because of this rule Turkish language sounds melodic.
• Nouns do not have gender.
• Adjectives come before nouns.
• Verbs come at the end of the sentence.
• Turkish uses word endings to convey meanings which, in other languages, such as English, are expressed using several separate words: e.g. sinemadayım means “the cinema-at-I am”.

The Turkish alphabet contains 29 letters. There are 8 vowels and 21 consonants. Although the letters Q, W, X do not appear, there are 6 more letters, namely; Ç, Ğ, Ş, Ö, Ü, I. Turkish pronunciation is very regular – every letter is pronounced fully and clearly, with each letter usually representing a single sound. Once the phonetic value of all letters is known, it is quite easy to pronounce any word. Most letters are pronounced very much as one would expect, but the following letters require explanation:

c is pronounced like "j" as in "judge"
ç is pronounced like "ch" as in "church"
g is pronounced like "g" as in "get"
ğ [soft g] never appears as the first letter in a word; essentially silent; sometimes lengthens the preceding vowel, sometimes pronounced like "y" in "yet"
ı (undotted "i" ) is pronounced like "i" as in "cousin"
j is pronounced like "j" as in "pleasure”, “rouge”
ö is pronounced like German "ö" as in "König" or French "eu" as in "peur"
ş is pronounced like "sh"as in "ship"
u is pronounced like "oo" as in "boot"
ü is pronounced like German "ü" as in "für" or French "u" as in "tu".

With a few exceptions such as place names which are stressed on the first syllable, Turkish words are often lightly stressed on the last syllable ( Rona, 1992).